arboretics

by Adrienne Rich

Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon’s eyelid

later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere

Tonight I think no poetry will serve

Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action

verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb    disgraced    goes on doing

sorry y'all i like to think...... about how aragorn and legolas are like opposite parallels... antiparallels in fact. aragorn is a man raised amongst the elves, disconnected from his identity, who journeys to rejoin his people and through that unite his own self and actualize his destiny. over time he becomes more man than elf, and maybe comes more to terms with the elements of his humanness that would have been impossible to grapple with as a child in rivendell surrounded by those who will not understand.

on the other hand, legolas is raised completely within his home environment, almost secluded in it, in mirkwood and satisfied completely by it (as far as we can read from the canon). but maybe he wonders about the outside world, experiences and feels in a different way, and so over the course of the quest/war, he explores his own uniqueness amongst his kind. he dedicates himself entirely not only to the problems of mortal cultures but to specific mortals themselves, becoming almost human-like over time, ingratiating himself amongst them, and while doing so is ominously informed that this flirtation with difference and mortality will bring about his own demise in a way. this being, of course, a sudden rupture with the landscape and culture he has always known and belonged to--because for one who loves mortals and middle-earth, to be sentenced to pass on from it in a final way, never to be reunited with those you cared about in their own afterlife, is a death sentence.